Talk:Mass surveillance in East Germany

A fact from Mass surveillance in East Germany appeared on Wikipedia's Main Page in the Did you know column on 9 February 2014 (check views). The text of the entry was as follows:

Did you know... that mass surveillance in East Germany was so extensive that there was one informer per every 6.5 citizens?

A record of the entry may be seen at Wikipedia:Recent additions/2014/February. The nomination discussion and review may be seen at Template:Did you know nominations/Mass surveillance in East Germany.

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Content fork?[edit]

@HectorMoffet: @Petrarchan47: so far, this is all about the Stasi. I suppose it could be expanded with information about Operation Gold and Teufelsberg. Do you have any other ideas about what could be added to it? If not, it seems like a content fork. If the intent is to have a series of articles titled Mass surveillance in country <foo> then just adding Operation Gold and Teufelsberg to the "See also" section of Stasi and creating Mass surveillance in East Germany as a redirect to Stasi should suffice. —rybec 05:22, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Great feedback, Rybec!

I agree that the article's scope needs to be expanded beyond the activities of more than one organization, otherwise, why not just call it "Mass surveillance by the Stasi" and/or merge it into Stasi.

I'll try adding Operation Gold and Teufelsberg, and other non-stasi surveillance in east Germany. That said, I'm fine if this winds up being merge back-- it just didn't seem appropriate to omit EastGermany and NorthKorea from the drafting process. :) --HectorMoffet (talk) 07:21, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Done I've added extensive content about both soviet and western surveillance. --HectorMoffet (talk) 18:10, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Brilliant. petrarchan47 t c 22:15, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Great find on the mail surveillance machine photos![edit]

Thanks to Rybec for the amazing find of those mail opening machines. Great work! --HectorMoffet (talk) 08:13, 30 January 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Soviet surveillance section[edit]

One of the sources [1] states

Although the Landesnachrichtenämter contained the seeds of eventual blanket surveillance, it is important to emphasize that the extent of surveillance at this point was considerably less.

In the other source [2] I only read the specific page that was cited, and it does support the statement in the Wikipedia article, but is silent about surveillance. It says there was a KGB office "in every province (Land) and district (Kreis)".

Is the section meant to provide background information, or is it intended to show that there was mass surveillance carried out by the Soviet Union in East Germany? —rybec 04:56, 7 February 2014 (UTC)[reply]